"Klax" is an i486 GNU/Linux Live-CD based on Slackware 10.1 with a patched Qt 3.3.4 and a complete KDE 3.4 Beta 2. Additionally it also contains KOffice 1.3.5 and k3b 0.11.20. All this within an ISO image of only 373MB. It can be used to give you an impression of the upcoming KDE 3.4, to verify if bugs still exist or discover new ones and to make screenshots. For more information and the download site visit the "Klax" Homepage.

After playing with it for some time, I saw that some issues havn't yet fixed in beta2:

- default system colors (i.e., erasing ~/.kde*) are not the Plastik one, they're a hybrid of old Keramik and Plastik which look quite awful!
- kmail icons!! i find hard to distinguish quickly between receive, reply and forward icons.. maybe colorizing differently the little circles in them would help?
- the default file open dialog has a very odd default size
- authentication using urls like http://username:password@www.site.com doesn't work when username is an email address
- ark: when i select two files in konqueror, and then right click on one of them and choose 'compress'->'gzippeed tar archive' I expect I'll get a single .tar.gz with both of the files, maybe with a fake default name. Works as expected if I choose 'add to archive'.

> - kmail icons!! i find hard to distinguish quickly between receive, reply and forward icons.. maybe colorizing differently the little circles in them would help?

Well, I found this bug (*) quite strange for KDE (since it's implementation was refused, it might have been missunderstood when it was reported).
It addresses the possibility of adding a new view-style for the toolbars combining "text on the right" and "icons only" styles into "selective text on the right". This would definitely increase visibility of "New" or "Send/Receive" buttons (in Kmail) & other buttons in konqueror for example.

Ok, seems Jean-Christophe will not create KDE 3.4 Beta 2 packages. I uploaded my less than half-official packages as used on Klax to http://ktown.kde.org/~binner/klax/10.1/ - the main packages should be fine, the dependencies packages are all missing descriptions/installation scripts and install to /usr.

Very cool stuff coming into KDE. The aesthetic changes are enough to upgrade! It was my first time experience with X.org, and those shadows and transulcenly really are nice. Now im waiting for the full release so i can use zeroconf, and other "under the hood" improvements.

really really cool work! KDE 3.4 seems to be in good shape. hmmm, in filebrowsing mode you don't have all these buttons for the view, its limited to three. good work.

And I love Kontact's new features, and the taskbar... really good... But I had some problems with the clock on the taskbar. I set it to analogue, and turn on anti-aliasing - whoops, messes up the whole clock!

But I love the speed and system:/ and and and all other features and refinements.